Legacy Giving Program Raises $1 Billion for Jewish Communities

A collaborative effort to build endowments to support the future of Jewish community organizations recently hit a major milestone: more than $1 billion in legacy-gift commitments in less than eight years.

Called Life & Legacy, the program includes coaching, training, and incentive grants to ensure that legacy giving becomes a norm in Jewish philanthropic culture.

The Harold Grinspoon Foundation started the program in 2012, partnering with Jewish federations and community foundations in a city or region over four years to help start a communitywide legacy-giving program. Since then, more than 63 communities in North America have participated with volunteers and staff promoting planned giving to more than 700 local organizations, including Jewish day schools, synagogues, and social-service charities.

“While $1 billion is a huge milestone, we also know it’s the tip of the iceberg,” says Arlene Schiff, national director of the Life & Legacy program. “We’re hoping that we’ll see another billion dollars in commitments in maybe half the time.”

In addition to reaching the dollar goal, the program has succeeded in improving how organizations within communities work together and “making the case that a rising tide does raise all boats,” Schiff says.

New Collaborations

Here’s how the program works: The foundation pays about a third of the program costs — a maximum of $100,000 per community for each of the four years. The federations and community foundations must come up with the rest.

The Grinspoon grants pay for training sessions during the four-year effort, and organizations get incentive grants if they reach their minimum goal for securing planned-gift commitments. Participating organizations set a goal for the number of planned-gift commitments they’ll aim to secure individually and collectively. During the first two years of the program, the target is 18, a spiritual number in Judaism. Each community also has a collective goal of 18 times the number of participating organizations. For example, a locale with 10 groups in the program will aim to get 180 commitments.

The investment from participating federations and community foundations generally covers marketing, staff travel to attend conferences, a donor thank-you event, and the salary of a part-time employee, who coordinates the local organizations and serves as liaison to the Grinspoon fund.

Participating organizations also form teams of volunteers to assist the paid staff member, who is often a rabbi or executive director. The volunteer team writes a legacy plan that outlines how the groups will carry out the first few years of the program and which donors they’ll approach first. During meetings with donors and prospects, the fundraisers are encouraged to promote each other’s causes. Pledge forms contain a list of all participating groups, and donors select an average of three organizations to receive a planned gift.

Community organizations go through training together, meet informally to share advice and discuss challenges, hold joint donor thank-you events, and share lists of 20 key prospects, often longtime donors.

Much of this, of course, has been upended by the pandemic.

When the pandemic started in March, the Grinspoon fund encouraged people to focus on stewarding donors who’ve already left a legacy gift and continuing to market the concept of legacy giving, Schiff says.

The program has always stressed that the best way to have the conversation about legacy giving is face-to-face. “We’ve had to back off on that, knowing that in most places and with many donors, face-to-face is not something that’s going to happen anytime soon,” Schiff says. Instead, she and her colleagues are coaching program participants on how best to send an email introduction and follow up with a phone or Zoom call to continue the conversation.

“While most organizations are struggling with working in this new environment, they also know that they can’t give up on planning for the future. While the pandemic is a crisis like no other, we know that it’s not going to be the last crisis,” Schiff says. “The fact that those organizations who’ve had an endowment now are in a better place than those who didn’t is enough motivation for our program participants to continue integrating legacy giving into their culture.”

The relationships organizations have built with each other through the Life & Legacy program are paying off as the pandemic drags on, Schiff says.

“You see a lot of federations running crisis campaigns and all of the organizations directing people to that one campaign versus running competing campaigns,” she says. “They then were able to pivot much more quickly to working collaboratively on another program because of the relationships they had built.”

Young Donors

The Jewish Federation of Cincinnati brought the Life & Legacy program to its community in 2014. The first group of 15 organizations quickly saw the value and started a second group, continuing to expand their program using local funds. The community now has 23 organizations that are collectively working on what the federation calls Create Your Jewish Legacy.

“Unlike hospitals and colleges who have been working on endowments for years and years and years, small agencies and organizations were not,” says Debra Steinbuch, director of planned giving and endowment at the federation. They might have a small one, but they didn’t necessarily know how to invest it or how to spend the money, she says.

Cincinnati was the first community in the program to secure 1,000 legacy commitments. In the early years of the program, it had the largest number of legacy commitments from donors in their 40s — younger than the typical planned-giving donor.

That’s thanks to a few specific tactics — and passionate volunteers.

A federation volunteer named Ariella Cohen was in her 40s when she made her planned-gift commitment. She grew up in Cincinnati and went to Jewish day school and Jewish camps and later sent her kids. She’s a member of a local synagogue and participated in a leadership program for Jewish adults. She went to her group of friends, held parlor meetings, and had conversations with them about legacy giving, Steinbuch says.

“She brought them along with her to have these conversations and to understand that you don’t have to be 50 and 60 and 70, that this isn’t about giving money out of your pocketbook today,” she says. Even if it’s committing just 1percent of your retirement account, it’s still doing something to keep your community vibrant well into the future, Cohen would tell them.

As the program progressed, conversations about legacy giving started to become a part of every committee meeting, every board meeting. “Any place we can have a conversation and talk about Create Your Jewish Legacy, we do,” Steinbuch says.

Harold Grinspoon Foundation

Program participants also encourage local financial advisers and estate lawyers to mention legacy giving in conversations with their clients.

And organizations that had never spoken were now collaborating.

“Our hope is that they will all be strong well into the future and that they will continue to sustain themselves over time,” Steinbuch says. “It feels like we’re helping them collectively understand all about endowments and building legacy for their community.” Equally important, she says, are the conversations about the value the organizations and the Jewish community add to donors’ lives.

Looking ahead, Schiff, with the Grinspoon fund, hopes other Jewish communities join the program. She also hopes other donors step forward to support the program’s operating costs in communities.

Being part of the national effort has allowed Jewish communities across the country to learn from each other, Steinbuch says.

“It’s nice to know we’re all really working together to make the Jewish world stronger,” she says. “This was like a cookbook that was put together for us. We needed to learn how to scramble the egg right, sift the flour right. Now we’re able to have successful long-term sustainability because we’ve been taught how to do it, and we’re able to teach other people.”

Plus, read a white paper on lessons learned from the program.